Darknet's blog

There is a story I'd like to tell you all. It's a story about two shows, which are loved by many. They were great shows, which could be watched and loved by people of all ages. This is their beginning and this is their end.

Let us start from the beginning. Greg Weisman is one of the world's best animators when it comes to TV shows. Everything he is involved with is just awesome. He lost his last show, The Spectacular Spider-Man, not to bad ratings but from Disney buying Marvel and thus ending the show. So Greg Weisman moved on and created Young Justice. It was a show that was complex, funny, action packed, and rich. It was so good that I said it was the best DC animated show I've ever seen. And it still is in my eyes. Then there is Green Lantern: TAS. Bruce Timm, known for the massively popular Timmverse he created with shows like Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, and the Justice League show. He was returning to create a show for Green Lantern, a superhero that was going places. The show was created to heighten Green Lantern along with the movie starring Ryan Reynolds. GL:TAS featured a great spin on the show, introducing great characters like Aya and Razer.

Each show was beloved. Young Justice was the #2 show on Saturday behind Star Wars: The Clone Wars and GL:TAS was just behind Young Justice. Where did it all go wrong?

The first nail in the coffin was the toy lines getting canceled. Toys are very important to kid shows like this. Cheap to make and a lot to charge. Young Justice had the worst of luck of getting their toys made by Mattel, and were shitty and thus no one bought them. GL:TAS actually had a good toy line but no one bought them. The biggest reason for that was the movie being so shitty. It marred the image of Green Lantern and no one wanted to buy their toys. So they were canceled.

But both shows were already ordered a second season, so they were coming no matter what. But there was a sense of dread. You stopped seeing commercials for the shows on CN. Not even a commercial to say when the show was coming back for a Season 2. Young Justice got only a couple of episodes in to Season 2 before it was delayed to work on the next episodes. GL:TAS was getting ready to premiere. They came back a bang. A couple of episodes in to the return, it happened: the delay.

Me and many others woke Saturday morning. I turned on CN and selected "Green Lantern: TAS" and instead of Hal Jordan, I was greeted with Dragons: Riders of Birk and Johnny Test. Out of the blue and so suddenly, CN pulled both Young Justice and GL:TAS for the next year. It happened so suddenly that the TV providers couldn't change the names. To this day, CN has never given a reason as to why they did this. There are theories but one kind of stands out.

A producer from Adventure Time said that, when comedy shows get popular, they get rid of the action shows. The delay's reason was believed to be an attempt to destroy the show. The idea is to delay it and bring it back with no mention, thus hurting the ratings. So when the ratings were bad, it would be justified in canceling it. This is backed up because the exact same thing happened to Thundercats and He-Man. Funny enough, it didn't work. When the delay came, CN forgot to pull the episodes from iTunes. The next day they took them off but not before a shit load of people bought them. Young Justice and GL:TAS became one of the most bought shows of the week. Not the best cartoons or best of the day. The best show of all TV for the entire week. And when the shows came back from the delay, the ratings weren't hurt.

But that didn't stop CN as they announced their list of shows for 2013-2014. Both Young Justice and GL:TAS were not on that list. It is gone. The fan backlash has been, shall we say, strong. If you go to CN's Facebook page, every update they make is filled with people asking for the shows to return. Their twitter is being spammed and here are multiple petitions going on that each range in to the tens of thousands. Will the campaign work? Probably not.

This is just a lesson, a tale if you will about the injustice of the world. A network would get rid of two beloved, much watched shows for no real reason. In the end, nothing good lasts forever. But then again, we kind of wish it would last just a little bit long.